Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Just who's being paternalist?

At UC Berkeley,
we are informing political debates surrounding online privacy through empirical
study of website behaviors. In 2009 and 2011, we surveyed top websites to
determine how they were tracking consumers. We found that advertisers were using
persistent tracking technologies that were relatively unknown to consumers. Two
years later, we found that the number of tracking cookies expanded dramatically
and that advertisers had developed new, previously unobserved tracking
mechanisms that users cannot avoid even with the strongest privacy
settings.

These empirical observations are valuable for the political
debate surrounding online privacy because they inform the framing and
assumptions surrounding the merits of privacy law.

Our work demonstrates
that advertisers use new, relatively unknown technologies to track people,
specifically because consumers have not heard of these techniques. Furthermore,
these technologies obviate choice mechanisms that consumers exercise. We argue
that the combination of disguised tracking technologies, choice-invalidating
techniques, and models to trick the consumers into revealing data suggests that
advertisers do not see individuals as autonomous beings. Once conceived of as
objects, preferences no longer matter and can be routed around with tricks and
technology.

In the political debate, “paternalism” is a frequently
invoked objection to privacy rules. Our work inverts the assumption that privacy
interventions are paternalistic while market approaches promote freedom. We
empirically demonstrate that advertisers are making it impossible to avoid
online tracking. Advertisers are so invested in the idea of a personalized web
that they do not think consumers are competent to decide to reject it. We argue
that policymakers should fully appreciate the idea that consumer privacy
interventions can enable choice, while the alternative, pure marketplace
approaches can deny consumers opportunities to exercise autonomy.

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I speak for myself. On this blog, I do not and cannot speak for Georgetown Law, the Organization for Transformative Works and/or AO3.